Lewis began working on Violet Schiff’s portrait in December 1922, but by 1926 he had still not completed it and Sidney Schiff persuaded him to hand it over unfinished and unsigned. The generosity of Schiff, who paid Lewis several advances for the painting, did not prevent him from being satirised in the novel The Apes of God (1930), which was “an immense work of fiction charged with a fury of eloquent opposition to almost everything and everybody”. Mr and Mrs Schiff correspond to the characters Isabel and Lionel Kein in The Apes of God. The following description of Isabel Kein is evidently based on Violet Schiff’s sittings for portrait.
“Isabel Kein, her handsome, brilliantly-painted mask, on high, assumed a seat near the fireplace. She stuck one leg out with a perfunctory roughness … The coils in the upholstery beneath concertinaed under the familiar pressure … Two panels on her black frock disguised the rotundances of the hips. A tippet of mauve silk was round her shoulders. Except for the vivacious and intelligent movements of the head, she moved very little while seated.”
This description is remarkable as it is solely visual. Lewis pays close attention to the posture and the impact of the body on the chair on which Isabel is seated. The description is clearly by a painter with an eye for detail. The “stumpy column” of Violet Schiff’s neck is accentuated by the beads encircling it on her portrait, but the painting does not convey the harsh satire of Lewis’s novel.